Carolyn Eubanks, longtime Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member, died in her home in the Bronx at the age of 80. Despite her advanced age, Carolyn was brimming with life. A tireless antiracist fighter and communist leader till the end, Carolyn spent the last week of her life volunteering at La Morada’s mutual aid soup kitchen,  showing up at the courthouse to support the family of Raymond Chaluisant, a  young worker murdered by a NYC  corrections kkkop, and attending a political event at the CUNY graduate center.
Antiracist upbringing
Born in North Carolina to a working-class family who  worked in a local company mill , Carolyn often credited her upbringing with setting her on the path to becoming a communist. Despite growing up in a racist Southern town during the Jim Crow era, her parents instilled in her antiracist working class values. Racist language was banned in their home. She witnessed capitalist oppression firsthand–the differential treatment given to the children of workers and bosses in the mills in school and in the town. Carolyn’s mother insisted she learn arithmetic to calculate her wages correctly, because the mill bosses could not be trusted.
In 1958 when the Soviet Union Launched Sputnik the U.S. bosses passed the National Defense Education Act which sent thousands of young people, including Carolyn,  to college on scholarships to study math and science. Carolyn always credited the Soviet Union for her college education and her route out of the company town. After graduating from the University of North Carolina she joined the Peace Corps, spending two years in the Philippines, where she saw the effects of imperialism and the ways large U.S. multinational corporations exploited workers around the world.
Joining the Party and facing the KKKops
 Carolyn met PLP when she was in New York studying at Union Theological Seminary. She was immediately won over to the Party’s idea of smashing capitalism and building a communist world and joined the Party. In the summer of 1979, Carolyn joined a PLP summer project in Tupelo, Mississippi which the KKK had declared would be their headquarters. Along with over 40 other protestors, Carolyn participated in an antiracist, multiracial march straight through Tupelo’s town center. When the march entered the town square a racist, abetted by the KKKiller Kops, fired a shotgun into the crowd and hit Carolyn with buckshot. When a second march was organized just three weeks later, Carolyn boldly marched in the first row alongside her Black and white comrades.
Organizing Black students from Houston to NYC
Carolyn taught for many years at Worthing High School, an all-Black school in the segregated part of Houston. Carolyn attended football games with her students, organized trips and socials, and led fightbacks against the racist conditions. She helped to organize a march in Houston commemorating the 1917 rebellion of Black soldiers who fought back against their racist abuse by white officers (see the book Night of Violence by Robert Hayes). She brought students and their parents to May Day demonstrations every year. She loved to host Game Nights at her apartment, where she made her famous chili. After many years teaching in Houston, Carolyn was attacked for being a communist. The death threats were real and constant. Carolyn slept with a loaded gun under her pillow but never wavered in her fightback.
After moving back to NYC, Carolyn taught math at John F. Kennedy High School, in the Bronx for twenty-five years. She helped students organize a sit-down protest when school security physically attacked several children. She also organized students, teachers and parents to fight back against cutbacks and the use of metal detectors.
Between 2005 and 2018 Carolyn made several trips to Israel-Palestine. Alongside comrades and workers in Israel and Palestine she helped organize against the fascist apartheid state, while raising internationalist communist politics. Her work united college students, medical workers, and educators in New York City and Israel-Palestine.She built close ties with workers living there, winning several of them to join the Party. In her 2018 trip, a group of students she inspired invited her to spend the day with them at a political camp they put together for Palestinian children. In New York, Carolyn was active in the international working group of PLP and once traveled with her comrade to Dallas to participate in a One State in Israel/Palestine conference, where she and a comrade insisted that the conference’s demand was insufficient if the state remained capitalist.
Bringing communism to the congregation
For years Carolyn was an active and beloved member of St Mary's, an integrated social justice church in Harlem She participated in Sunday morning services injecting communist politics into discussions of "grounds for hope," while sharing coffee. She was a mainstay in the food distribution program and, most importantly, she was a vital leader in the church’s justice and peace organizing. Through the Congregations for Justice and Peace, Carolyn, alongside comrades and friends, fought against Columbia University’s racist displacement agenda, organized to restore the community health clinic, and demonstrated against racist police terror.
Carolyn helped lead the fight against racist cop terror in the Bronx for more than 30 years. In the 90’s, she joined forces with the Baez, Vega, Zarate, and Rosario families - all whose children were murdered by the New York Police Department. She helped build Parents Against Police Brutality (PAPB), which was one of the country’s first family-led organizations, specifically assembled to unite the families of countless Black and Latin workers murdered by the NYPD.This organizing culminated with Carolyn helping to organize and lead the very first open and PLP-led march against the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999. Her commitment to the victims’ families was an example for all as she continued to lead and organize against the murder of Ramarley Graham and Shantell Davis.
A fighter til the end
During the last year of her life, she played an important role in helping to lead  PLP’s most recent struggle against the murder of Raymond Chaluisant, organizing several rallies in his neighborhood supporting his family, and attending almost every one of kkkiller cop Dion Middleton’s court appearances. Carolyn always made a point of building relationships with the families of these victims, while struggling with them and all workers and students involved, to understand that only a communist revolution will bring an end to racist cop killings.
Bella Ciao, Carolyn
Carolyn left an indelible mark on comrades, friends, and all those who knew her.  She devoted her life time  to serving the working class.We can honor her legacy by living each day as she did—with love and concern for the working class. In Carolyn’s memory: Let’s fight for a better world, let's fight for communism!

NEW YORK CITY, February 23—NYC’s City Council held hearings on a bill that would cut city sponsored health benefits. These cuts are coming because capitalism is in crisis and at war. The bosses are trying to manage their crisis on the backs of the working class. The bosses view the lives of retirees as expendable since they no longer produce profits. At the hearing city and union leaders spoke on the need to control costs by cutting benefits. Retirees spoke against decreasing access to health benefits or increasing the costs to workers when they use these benefits. The struggle to stop the reduction of city sponsored health benefits to these and the current workforce continues. The racist cuts are also exposing once again that the union’s leadership is loyal to the bosses system and will do whatever the ruling class needs them to do.Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members active in this struggle are urging our friends to join our movement to build a communist world where healthcare will be free to all based only on their needs.
Workers are fighting back!
CHALLENGE has reported on efforts by retirees to stop these givebacks which have been agreed to by the New York City government and the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), an umbrella of all city unions having contracts with NYC. Demonstrations at city hall and union headquarters as well as mass letter writing and telephone call campaigns have expressed our anger at attempts to privatize our medicare benefits. This attempted change will mean less access to needed health treatment and will affect low-income workers the most (disproportionately. Black, Latin and women). Now this same gang is pressing for similar reductions for the active workers. Similar cuts are going on or have taken place throughout the U.S.
War and economic crisis driving attacks on health benefits
The U.S. bosses are facing the increased likelihood of war as they face off against their main imperialist rival China and its ally Russia. To prepare for war, bosses want to divert billions to the war budget. They know that healthcare costs as a share of the U.S. gross national product have risen from 5 percent in 1960 to 19.7 percent in 2020 (USA facts.org). Lowering these costs potentially would free up money for the war chests.
The war is related to the economic crisis being felt around the world as imperialist powers like the U.S., China and Russia compete for profits and power. As hospitals merge and grow into larger conglomerates, they demand higher rates for their services. For example the cost of a colonoscopy can range from $1,100 to $3,700 for the same procedure depending on where you go (Choicehealth.com). The pharmaceutical industry is charging whatever the market will pay for new life saving drugs. New cancer drugs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for those who can afford them or have insurance that will pay for them. National total health expenditures are expected to grow by at least 5.1 percent from 2021-2030 (USAfacts.org). The biggest bosses, who control policy, want to cut these costs so that they can compete against their imperialist rivals.
Fight to learn, learn to fight!
As we engage our class enemy, we need to learn about how capitalism works. We are building PLP study groups to help build more communist leaders/fighters in this battle. Join us to build a healthier world under communism!

Fight back and crush the bosses’ traps

Wage theft in New York City, despite the existence of laws that “protect” the worker, is very much a common thing. We know about the law against wage theft, but it is increasingly difficult to find justice, since for any claim they divide the workers so that they make these actions only individually.
At the beginning of this month, a group of more than 40 workers from different community organizations met, marched and held a sit-in in front of a luxurious hotel, on 60th Street near Central Park. The action was taken because the hotel bosses fired, unfairly and without reason,and stole wages from a worker with many years of service. That worker had not been informed of her dismissal and she was not allowed to go into work when she had arrived to do so.
The organization, where several Progressive Labor Party comrades are members, accompanied her and we chanted our classic slogans in the march: “Workers United Will Never Be Defeated!” … “This Fist Can be Seen, Workers in Power,”and other chants. At the door of the hotel, the letter was delivered to those in charge of the administration on duty, and we hope soon for the solution and reinstatement to the worker at this employment.
The bosses make the laws and the traps; the workers must fight and crush their traps.

*****

Capitalist disaster steals lives
After viewing daily media video on the Turkey-Syria earthquake, two contradictions emerge, the first being the total absence of any steel beams in the concrete-wire mesh debris from endless photos of modern high-rise buildings that collapsed over each other. The second contradiction was many perfectly intact high-rise buildings right across streets from rows of collapsed homes. Turkish leader Erdogan had granted amnesty to housing contractors who’d defied safety codes and regulations using wire mesh instead of steel beams to provide faster, cheaper building frames. Not only did the cheaper constructed buildings fail to prevent the earthquake from flattening them, but the wire mesh debris has prevented rescuers from digging victims out. There are also protests over a missing billion-dollar fund collected after the last earthquake to build aid stations and care for victims of future catastrophes. Because of capitalist greed and corruption, Turkey is approaching 50,000 casualties and 13 million homeless.
Meanwhile in the US, a two-mile long 150-car train crash in Ohio is flooding thousands in poor communities with toxic gasses and poisoned water. Railroad companies are profiting big time in cuts in their workforce, maintenance and safety.
Today’s events prove capitalists will sacrifice to the last worker for their own profits and will stop at nothing to stay in power. Progressive Labor Party calls for a communist revolution to replace our profit dominated social system with a communist society without wages, profits and divisions.

*****

She was a comrade to look up to
A comrade to look up to. The day after the family of Raymond appeared in a Bronx court, I called Carolyn to find out what happened. She said she debated with herself whether to go to the court and decided to go. Raymond’s mother and our comrade hugged and shared a few words. An example of Carolyn’s confidence and undying love of our working class.

*****

Workers call out China CP’s sellout
Some older people in China seem to remain boldly supportive of real communist principles, and critical of the Communist Party’s sellouts.
The following passage is from a New York Times article yesterday about recent protests in China against cuts in government-provided medical insurance.
“Video footage that circulated online indicated that large crowds gathered around Zhongshan Park in Wuhan, as the police tried to divide them by imposing barricades. When police officers tried to push the crowds back, older men and women refused to back off and shouted in officers’ faces. Some sang songs like “The Internationale,” an anthem employed by both the ruling Communist Party and by protesters, who have used it to suggest that the party has strayed from its ideological roots.”

This is part one of a three-part series. This article is a republication and originally appeared in CHALLENGE in February 2021. The history here is worth reprinting, revisiting, and relearning every year.

Langston Hughes was the premier 20th-century poet for the U.S. working class, and particularly for Black workers. He spoke to their dreams of a world without racism and the harsh realities of Jim Crow and pervasive segregation. Born in 1901 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest, Hughes spent his early 20s attending colleges, working on ships, and traveling through West Africa and Europe. He became one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, when writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, historians, sociologists, and organizers made Harlem a dynamic center for culture and politics. Even the Depression of the 1930s could not dampen this creative environment for Black artists, thinkers, and organizers.    
The 1930s was also the decade when many well-known artists embraced communist ideas in their quest to end the racist inequalities of capitalism. In 1932, Hughes went to the Soviet Union with a group of Black artists and filmmakers to create a film about Black life and racism in the U.S. South (The project was canceled after Franklin Roosevelt recognized the USSR). Later Hughes traveled to Spain for the Baltimore Afro-American, a weekly newspaper, to cover the anti-fascist struggle in the Spanish Civil War. This was the period of his most radical poetry, much of it submitted to New Masses, a weekly edited by members of the Communist Party USA (CP).  One of his most famous was “Good Morning Revolution,” which Hughes wrote in 1932. It openly calls for a society run by and for the working class. Here are some excerpts:  

Good-morning, Revolution:
    You’re the very best friend
    I ever had
  We gonna pal around together from now on.
    …
    Listen, Revolution,
    We’re buddies, see –
    Together,
    We can take everything:
    Factories, arsenals, houses, ships,
    Railroads, forests, fields, orchards,
    Bus lines, telegraphs, radios,
    (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!)
    Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas,
    All the tools of production,
    (Great day in the morning!)    
    Everything –
    And turn ‘em over to the people who work.
    Rule and run ‘em for us people who work.

Fighting Jim Crow and police murder
The political ground shifted in the 1940s, as the CP focused less on communist revolution and more on building an anti-fascist united front to defeat Germany in World War II. Black workers and communists advanced the “Double V” goal—victory against the fascists in Europe and victory against segregation at home.  In 1942, Hughes was hired by the Chicago Defender, another prominent Black newspaper. His columns attacked the racist abuse of Black soldiers stationed in the South, which Hughes compared to Nazi Germany. In a February 26, 1944 column, Hughes described a Black soldier just returned to the U.S. from fighting overseas.  The soldier suffered from “Jim Crow shock, too much discrimination—segregation-fatigue which, to a sensitive Negro, can be just as damaging as days of
heavy air bombardment.”  In August 1943, when a Black soldier was shot and wounded by a cop after a fracas at the Braddock Hotel at West 126th Street, the rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. In the ensuing rebellion, stores were looted and property damage was estimated at up to $5 million. Six thousand National Guardsmen were called in and over six hundred people were arrested. (See Dominic J. Capeci, Jr., The Harlem Riot of 1943, Philadelphia: 1977.)
To Hughes, the politics of the incident were clear. In his August 14, 1943, Chicago Defender column addressed to “White Shopkeepers Who Own Stores in Negro Neighborhoods,” Hughes wrote: “The damage to your stores is primarily a protest against the whole rotten system of Jim Crow ghettos, Jim Crow cars, and Jim Crow treatment of Negro soldiers.  But, you say, you are not responsible for those Jim Crow conditions.  Why should your windows be broken?  They shouldn’t.  I am sorry they are.  But I can tell you WHY they are broken.” Hughes goes on to cite Black workers’ grievances, from racist unemployment to price gouging and substandard housing. He ends by observing: “I do not believe in mob violence as a solution for social problems.  But I do understand what it is that makes many young people in Negro neighborhoods an easy prey to that desperate desire born of frustration—to which you contribute—to hurl a brick through a window.”  
    In his book-length poem suite, Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Hughes included the poem “Harlem,” which expresses visceral sensations of pent-up rage:  

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore----
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over ----
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Writing and Fighting anti-communist opppression
In the late 1940s, as the U.S. capitalist rulers vied for world supremacy against the socialist Soviet Union, the bosses’ federal government led the charge to investigate and harass members of the Communist Party USA.  In January 1949, twelve CPUSA leaders, including Black New York City Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr., went on trial for violating the Smith Act by “advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Though Hughes never officially  joined the CPUSA, his communist sympathies were clear. The FBI placed him under surveillance. Writing in the Chicago Defender, February 5, 1949, he declared that the trial was
the most important thing happening in America today . . . because it is your trial—all who question the status quo—who question things as they are—all poor people, Negroes, Jews, un-white Americans, un-rich Americans are on trial. . . . They are being tried because they say it is wrong for anybody—Mexicans, Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Armenians—to be segregated in America; because they say it is wrong for anybody to make millions of dollars from any business while the workers in that business do not make enough to save a few hundred dollars to live on when they get old and broken down and unable to work anymore; they are being tried because they do not believe in wars that kill millions of young men and make millions of dollars for those who already have millions of dollars; they are being tried because they believe it is better in peace time to build schools, hospitals, and public power projects than to build warplanes and battleships.
By the 1950s, the bosses’ blacklisting and FBI harassment led many communists and leftists to retreat from open activism. But Hughes kept writing for the Chicago Defender until 1962. His bold and lyrical poetry, notably the two poems of One-Way Ticket (1951) that address lynchings in the South, live on as an inspiration to all who struggle against racism and for the international working class.